I have a section on my site where I type looser blog posts. This section is called the “notepad“. None of these posts appear in my email newsletter. They don’t appear in my RSS feed. This helps me to get away from my fear of publishing quick blog posts. I often want to make each post better, and then they never get published.
This notepad section helps me to publish freely. The notepad posts are still accessible on my site, under the tucked-away notepad section.
These notepad posts were programmed to never appear on the homepage, but now I figured, I’ll enable them to appear on the homepage. I’m fairly certain that the only people checking out the homepage are new visitors. So I might as well allow them to see these quickie posts.
My homepage doesn’t get much love, because my publishing frequency has gone down. I think that hurts my Google rankings. To help Google to see that my site is a bit more alive, I’ll let the notepad posts appear on the homepage.
Baffling stats
I’m not sure what to make of Google Analytics stats for my homepage.
The “Behavior flow” section of Google Analytics
So far this year (which is 8 months), my homepage has gotten 2,500 views. 2,300 of those end up dropping off. Wow. That’s 93% of people not clicking on anything on the homepage. I don’t know how true this is, because Google Analytics is telling me that the number one link people click on the homepage is spudart.org/blog. Um. There is no link to that specific URL on my homepage. None.
Then the next one is spudart.org/contacts (that’s a page), and my projects (that’s a page).
The “Site Content” section of Google Analytics
According to the “Site Content” section, my homepage has 2,615 pageviews with a bounce rate of 25.13%.
Oooook. 25% bounce rate sounds AWESOME!! But Behavior flow says 93% dropoffs, which is awful. Which is it?
Why does “Behavior flow” and “Site Content” have drastically different stories?
Anyhow, I’m adding the notepad posts to the homepage. I don’t think this will really alter anything with people coming to the site more. But maybe Google will like it that I’m updating the homepage more frequently with new posts.